Tiller walked out in the pre-noon light and stood, and for a brief moment he saw that he was alone in a town populated by fantasy creatures and monsters.

  Suddenly Tiller discovered that his new-found comfort with the bizarreness of this world had evaporated.

  Pod had gotten what he wanted. He’d helped, yes, but with his drinking money scored he was gone. It left Tiller to explore the main street on his own.

  The monstrous bulk of a minotaur nearly swept him away. The crowds had grown denser as the day grew longer. He stepped out of the way to marshal himself.

  I’ve got 38 coins. I’ve got a sense now of what I can earn. One pack of ten-day seeds seems to yield about ten coins’ worth of produce. I have the feeling a twenty-day seed seems to score about twenty coins. There are real-time supply and demand issues going on as well. We made more from Tonk because he needed stock. I could go out and plant nothing but ten-day crops, harvest that, and come back here, but I get the feeling my price is going to be hurt if I oversupply…

  He turned and looked back into Tonk’s shop window. The prices for everything were marked. He did his best to track what he could, but there was too much to remember.

  Eventually, Medley’s not going to have enough of a market… Not if I scale up the way I have to. I need to find out if there are other towns, if they’re reachable. Hey, Tonk’s got quite the markup. Hmmm. If I could figure out how to sell right to the consumer I could really pad my margins.

  Tiller turned from the shop window and took a breath. “Okay. Slow down. Let’s take care of what we need to take care of.”

  They had passed a general store on their way to Tonk’s food store. Tiller braced himself and joined the flow of the crowd. He felt eyes on him. Many of the strange peoples that populated Medley seemed to inspect him with interest. His humanity seemed to draw interest. Maybe his stone band too. The overwhelming majority of the passersby bore clay bands. Stone bands were rare enough. He had been looking out and thus far had seen only a couple of iron bands. In all his time here, in this bizarre world, he had yet to see anything higher than an iron band.

  Another Bufo stood behind the counter in the general store. Its clothes and voice marked it as male, and its greeting was friendly and open as he stepped through the doors, but its eyes were intensely curious at his appearance.

  The general store was hodgepodge. Every sort of thing was displayed on the shop floor and in rows of shelves behind the counter. There were barrels filled with tools. Boxes, bottles, and paper packets of every shape and size lined the shelves. A sword gleamed on a rack.

  The Bufo spoke, “Welcome, stranger. Name’s Glupp. What can I do for you?”

  Tiller hesitated. He could hear the uncertainty in his voice. “Err… hi. I’m kinda new around here. I’m looking for a few bits and pieces, but I don’t know what things are worth. I just want to figure out the prices of things so I can work out what I should be getting.”

  Glupp didn’t overreact. “Well, that’s sensible enough, newcomer. What’s your name?”

  “Tiller.”

  Tiller noticed Glupp’s eyes lingering on his stone band, maybe on his cinder sigil. Glupp bore a clay band, but Tiller saw it was completely filled, five sigils shining there.

  “Well, Tiller, what are you in the market for? I’m sure you’ll find Glupp has what you seek, and at the best prices you could hope for.”

  Tiller said, “Pen and paper?”

  Glupp nodded and turned, dropping an ink bottle, quill, a notebook, and a stack of sheets onto the counter. “How’s that?”

  Tiller scratched the back of his head. He had not considered having to use a quill to do his writing. “Do you… have anything other than the quill? Something, I dunno, easier?”

  Glupp arched an eyebrow but turned again, this time producing a pencil.

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  “Okay. So… um, like I said, I need to do some legwork figuring out the prices of things. I mightn’t be buying much right now, just sussing for now. How much are these?”

  “The sheets are two gold for the bundle, the notebooks the same, the pencil will go for two as well.”

  Tiller tried not to show his grimace. It would cost him four coins for a notebook and a pencil. That was a depressing amount, but he’d been struggling for days with the need of something to help him organize his thoughts and plans. He had to remind himself of the scale of the task before him. He needed to make so much money, four coins was nothing in the grand scheme. Even Pod may have been right, a couple of beers wouldn’t have an appreciable effect on his rate of accumulation.

  “Okay… what if I gave you three for the notebook and pencil altogether?” he said with a certain apprehension, expecting the Bufo to be offended or annoyed at his attempt to barter.

  Instead, the merchant didn’t so much as bat an eye. “I’ll do three and a half for ya.”

  “A half?” Tiller winced as soon as he said it. He did not want to draw attention to how truly alien he was. It would probably be bizarre for someone not to understand how their currency worked.

  Glupp eyed him strangely and responded slowly, “Yes… a half…”

  Tiller just said, “Okay.”

  He reached into his sack and passed four coins to the Bufo, expecting him to make change. Instead, the merchant, eying him with new concern, simply snapped one of the coins in half and retained the other three and a half pieces.

  Tiller looked at the half coin the merchant had returned to him. It was snapped perfectly in half, a razor-straight edge at the break. “So when you said three and a half you really meant it.”

  Glupp continued to eye him with uncertainty.

  Tiller spent thirty minutes or so with the shopkeeper, asking about stock and prices, finally able to take notes. Tools he discovered were far too expensive to even consider. Items for storage like cloth sacks and jars were almost negligibly inexpensive. Seed packets generally cost between one and two gold. There were some particularly expensive seeds; Tiller took note of these two for later consideration. For now he was satisfied that he could more or less make ten coins in produce for every one coin he spent on seeds.

  As time went on he got the sense that he was testing Glupp’s patience. He apologized for taking so much of the merchant’s time and left, apologizing for not making more purchases immediately, making the excuse that he needed to budget for his purchases and would most likely return.

  There was one other general store in the town, operated by a goblin named Gick. Gick’s store was not located on the main street but down a smaller lane. It was distinctly smaller and grottier in appearance, with a much narrower array of stock. The prices were similar to Glupp’s, but Gick was far more amenable to bargaining.

  Amongst the organized chaos of the dimly lit shop, something caught his eye.

  “Hey, um… what’s that?”

  Gick’s dark little eyes lit up at his interest. “That? Oh, friend, that’s just the thing for you. I was going to mention it, but you said your finances were… shall we say constrained?”

  Tiller walked over. It was something like a wooden box on four legs, with a hatch on the top. He couldn’t explain his attraction to the item, but when he touched it, just brushing the backs of his fingers against it, his farming sigil pulsed with faint light.

  Gick said, “This, my friend, is a composter. Soil-generative variety, to be precise.”

  “Holy shit, it makes earth?”

  “That it does! Organic matter goes in the top, soil comes out the bottom. Living out there on one of those little islands, it’s hard to imagine something that could improve your life, or your prospects, more than that.”

  Tiller’s mind immediately flashed back to Shopkeeper. He had mentioned composters too, as though they would make the holy grail of tools for what he hoped to do.

  “Organic material? Like grass? Or potato leaves?”

  “Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmmm, those will do. Works even better with bigger, nastier things. Loves meat; flesh. Especially monsters.”

  Tiller’s lip twitched in mild distaste. “It… doesn’t look complicated. Couldn’t I just… build one?”

  Gick said, “Oh sure, you could, you could. But you’re not a crafter. And something like this, a soil maker that eats just about anything you throw at it, and does it fast, by the way, I don’t mind telling you. Something like this needs a crafter with a very high band and very special sigils. It’s a very rare, very special item.”

  Gick watched Tiller with rapt attention. Then Tiller asked the question. “How much?”

  Gick said, “I’d be a fool to let this go for anything less than two thousand gold. But you’re new, and I can see we could have a long and profitable friendship. It’s only in my interest to see you succeed, so I’ll do this, and it breaks my heart to do it, I won’t eat this week, but I’ll let it go for a thousand. One thousand gold. All yours.”

  Tiller’s heart sank. A thousand gold. Would it be worth it to accumulate that much and put it all back into something that could literally make land for growing? Like so much else, a thousand was a drop in a bucket that was meant to hold ten million. The realization of this made him quake at the enormity of what he faced.

  By the time Tiller finished annoying Gick, whose patience seemed to exhaust much more quickly than Glupp’s, the sun had clearly passed its zenith. The smells of cooking food became more pronounced. The rich brown aroma of cooking meat and fried starches began to pull at Tiller’s attention.

  He had the information he needed. A page in his notebook, made up as a table, comparing prices and stock between the two general stores.

  There was only one more task that really needed attention before he could make his purchases and head back.

  He needed a means to get rid of Bonk.

  To that end, he made his way to Spinner’s Tavern.